Military Software Developers Get Enhanced Social Network

Military software developers are getting a social network that the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) hopes will make them more productive and boost code sharing and reuse. As we reported earlier this week, DISA is basing the Forge.mil Community on Acquia's version of Drupal Commons, a social networking extension of the open source Drupal Web content management platform.

Forge.mil is a secure website for the military and its software contractors that is based on the same open source software asSourceForge, including the SVN source code versioning system and related CollabNet tools. DISA actually supports two versions, SoftwareForge, which has about 9,000 users, and ProjectForge, a version for projects that require their own private collaboration space. DISA functions as a network and cloud services provider to the branches and departments of the military, so it charges for ProjectForge while making SoftwareForge freely available to authorized users.

The existing Forge.mil tools were effective for collaboration between members of individual projects, but the Forge.mil Community will help promote collaboration on a larger scale, Forge.mil Project Manager Dan Gahafer said in a briefing Wednesday. "This gives us a community layer above what SoftwareForge provides, with content management, information sharing, and the ability to organize around non-project lines."